Sunday, August 15, 2010

I was looking around for a .mp3 player solution for a prop I had an idea for (more on that later), and came across a couple of boards at MDFly.com.

The SD/Thumb drive board behaves just like a regular .mp3 player, but has the advantage of having the controls readily available so you don't have to tear one apart & hack the controls to use it. MP3 files can be stored on either a SD card or a USB thumb drive.

The board that really piqued my interest, however, was the serial TTL interface SD board (sold out as of this writing - sorry). This board is controlled by TTL level serial commands, making it a prime candidate for control by an EFX-Tek controller or a pic or Picaxe microcontroller. The board supports direct play of up to 199 .mp3 files, as well as random playback of a single track.

I have both these boards and can verify that they do work as advertised. Now to use them in a prop... :)

I formatted a 2GB card FAT16 & it worked fine. I'm not sure, but I doubt the boards will handle SDHC cards (cards bigger than 2GB). There's a big thread on the picaxe forum about these boards (I think it's the picaxe forum - I'm at work, so I don't have the link) that has a link to a much more detailed user manual. I'll try to find it tonight.

Here's the link to the more complete manual - http://www.warf.com/download/5029_98...%20V2.1%20.pdf

I haven't had any time to play around any more with these boards - have some family health issues we're dealing with just now. Hopefully by the time the weather warms up I'll be able to work on them a little more.

Just stumbled onto your blog. I love it. I just purchased both of these boards. Jeff Wheat from www.simplecircuitboards.com designed a board around the TTL board for about $34. Pretty cool. I'm playing around with the other one to see if I like it. I just want a cd quality sound(s) that can be triggered.